Archive for the ‘Kids Crafts’ Category

I don’t mean to brag, but my kids are so blessed to have such an incredible Dad. He is the ultimate go-to guy from helping the kids with their homework, to kicking around the soccer ball, to indulging my daughter in her fancy tea parties, to the ultimate bedtime storyteller.

This Father’s Day we wanted to make a gift that we just knew he would love to show just how special he is to us. Our Dad happens to have a sweet tooth so we decided to make him a candy bouquet that he could place on his desk at work when those sweet tooth cravings strike!

The best part about this gift though is that it only takes fifteen minutes to create, costs about $20 in supplies, and can be created with your kids in honor of their favorite Dad.

Father’s Day is just around the corner & today we wanted to share a monster of a Father’s Day gift with a cute spin on the monster theme with easy monster cookie bars and printable monster cards for a special Dad in your life.

This week’s challenge from Walmart was to create an inexpensive Father’s Day gift that would wow your Dad. Well, if your dad is anything like our Dad, he is certainly wowed with homemade treats and funny cards with a great sense of humor. Our idea was to mix up a batch of thick and delicious Monster Cookie Bars made with rolled oats, peanut butter, mini M&M’s (found over in their candy aisle), and chocolate chips.

Monster Cookies can be a bit of a monster to create as a drop cookie because of their monster size. I choose to echo the words of an amazing woman I once heard speak these wise words…

“Ain’t nobody got time for that.”

Wise, right?

Bar cookies get a big fist pump from this busy mom and if a celebration requires a cookie, I often rely on these chocolate chip cookie bars to get us through whatever baking requirements are made for those occasions. These Monster Cookie Bars are equally delicious and offer that crusty exterior with that soft interior that makes, in my humble opinion, the perfect cookie.

What Father’s Day would be complete without a card to accompany your sweet gift? We are so excited to debut these adorable Monster cards that you can print out to attach with your Monster Cookie Bars for your favorite Dad. We have included three fun printable cards for Father’s Day and then 1 that could be used for any occasion to accompany your sweet treat. Print these printables out on white card stock and you will be all set for this Father’s Day!

Download Your FREE Monster Card Printables HERE:

I can admit that this family has had Monsters on our brain after getting a sneak peek at the Monsters University movie that is set to hit theaters on June 21st. While our family was at the Disney Social Media Moms conference, we got an exclusive sneak peek at the film. It is FANTASTIC, and dare I say it, even funnier than the first one. I have no doubt that your family will love it!

Our Monster Cookie Bars would really pull together a fun family night out to see this fantastic film and you can find loads of fun Monsters supplies in the party favors aisle of your Walmart store including fun cups, plates, and other party favors for an inexpensive night to enjoy while tackling your summer bucket list or our 100 Days of Summer Pinterest Board.

Now that you have the printables, here is the deliciously easy and tasty recipe for these Monster Cookie Bars. We recommend preparing these in a metal 9×13 pan for best results!

Monster cookies made easy in a bar cookie. Be sure to pair these easy cookies with our free Monster printables.

Ingredients

1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, softened

1-1/2 cups creamy peanut buter

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup granulated sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 eggs

1 cup rolled oats

1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

1 cup mini M&M's (approximately half a bag)

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a 9x13 pan with nonstick spray.

In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.

In a separate bowl, beat together the butter and peanut butter until smooth. Add the sugars and beat until blended. Add the vanilla and eggs and mix until light and fluffy.

Gradually add the flour mixture until just combined.

Mix in oats until well combined.

Stir in chocolate chips and mini M&M's

Press dough evenly into prepared baking dish. Bake for 30-35 minutes or until lightly golden brown and set in the middle. Let cool completely in baking dish then cut into bars. Store in an airtight container.

#version#

Happy Father’s Day to all of our Dad readers (I know you’re out there!) and here’s hoping you get spoiled by a few of your favorite monsters!

Be sure to check back this week for more great Father’s Day gifts on a budget!

Summer is just around the corner and I am so excited to share with you that I have gathered another 100 Days of Summer activities for you to do with your kids in the summer months. These are 100 activities that are all low to no cost, screen-free, and a fun way to build truly memorable moments with your kids in the summer months.

I am looking forward to tackling our own summer list and will be documenting our projects through mobile pictures.You can catch me on Instagram, where I am documenting our summer. Just search for the username momadvice and you will find me there. Just as a side note, I try to always answer all the comments on my pictures if I can. If you have questions about projects we are doing or just want to say hello, I will do my best to respond!

If you are on Instagram, you can join in on the fun by taking pictures and sharing all of your summer adventures through there. Let’s use the hashtag #100summerdays again like we did last year.

By tagging your photos, it will make it easy to find each other in the group and share the projects we are tackling together. You can add the tags to your caption or you can add them as a comment later. In either scenario, the tag will pull it into our summer group.

I still will be sharing our apron full of giveaways and our notebook of inspiration each week. I will also have fresh content through my freelance writing jobs this summer with Kenmore, Goodwill, Jack’s Pizza, & Walmart that will keep our site fully loaded with great ideas for your summer.

For the rest of my entries, I will be sharing what we are working on from our summer list through mobile pictures and quick notes on what fun activities we are doing at our house. I am hoping it will be an inspiration to you to get out and enjoy the summer with your children. I can’t say we will tackle a hundred activities, but I will be awfully proud if we do one cool activity a week.

This year’s list is AMAZING and my favorite so far from making chevron friendship bracelets, to building race tracks, to painting techniques on rain days, to creating popsicle light sabers. There really is something for EVERY age group this year.

Be sure to follow me on Pinterest for inspiration for your meal planning, home, reading, wardrobe and more! I am one happy little pinner!

Summer is just around the corner and before it gets here I wanted to share my favorite homemade sidewalk chalk paint recipe. Making DIY sidewalk chalk paint couldn’t be easier and many of the supplies are likely lurking right in your cupboard.

Today’s project is sponsored by Walmart and you can find all of the supplies you need to create this easy recipe, right at your local store, from the brushes to the food coloring to the paint storage containers.

Did you know that you can make sidewalk chalk paint from three simple ingredients? Homemade sidewalk chalk paint is made from a mixture of cornstarch, water, and food coloring. When visiting the baking aisle to get your food coloring, be sure to pick up the brightest and most vivid colors you can find to really make the colors pop on your sidewalk.

Proper storage of your paints will help them go farther. I love to grab lidded disposable containers to store the extra paint in and with a quick rinse of your brushes, your supplies are ready for the next day of painting.

Of course, this isn’t the only recipe we have to keep your kids entertained in the summer! I am so excited to share with you that I will be doing another 100 Days of Summer AGAIN (third year running!) on Pinterest and will be sharing 100 SCREEN-FREE, FREE or PRACTICALLY FREE activities to keep your kids entertained this summer. Be sure to start following on Pinterest so you don’t miss the big reveal and so you can begin adding a few of these ideas to your summer bucket list!

I think this year’s list will be the best one yet, but in the meantime, here are a few of our favorite activities we did this past year to get you inspired!

What could be a better gift for Mother’s Day than a bouquet of pom pom posies that you can enjoy all year long? You won’t believe how easy it is to make pom pom flowers for a special mom in your life. Walmart challenged us to come up with a fun Mother’s Day project that anyone can do for someone special in their life and we are so excited to show you how easy (and thrifty!) this little project is!

Directions:

1. Make an assortment of Pom-Poms using your desired method of pom-pom creating. Follow my picture tutorial above if you would like to use the Clover Pom-Pom Maker that I discovered.

Why I Am Using The Clover Pom-Pom Makers: I have tried every thrifty known method for making pom-poms from cardboard, to forks, to compact discs. To make this bouquet of posies, I decided to see if I could find a gadget to help me and I cannot rave about this Clover Pom-Pom Maker enough. It is the perfect tool to add to your arsenal if you are making pom poms and it is simple enough that my 7 year-old could use it.

2. Open a package of cookie sticks and remove one from the package. Begin wrapping yarn around the cookie stick, covering all of the white parts. I start the yarn weaving the tail in at the top so that I don’t have to glue it at the top. It’s okay if there is a bit of white showing at the top because your pom-pom will cover it!

3. Once you are almost to the bottom of the stem, add a dab of hot glue and continue wrapping until you get to the bottom. Snip the end of the yarn that has been secured with the glue.

4. Add a dab of hot glue at the top of your stem and then secure a colored pom pom to the top. Hold in place for thirty seconds.

5. Gently bend your stem (gently or it will break) to create a more natural looking flower. Set aside and repeat this process with the rest of the flowers.

That’s it!

TA-DA!

Easy yarn pom-pom posies that are sure to brighten any mom’s day! If you want to really make this cute gift stand out even more, here are a couple of more sweet ideas to really set the mood for a special mom in your life.

I went ahead and bought the Small Clover Pom-Pom Maker to show you how cute this one is for decorating a cupcake for a special mom in your life. We just hot glued this little cutie on the top of a toothpick and it only took a couple of minutes to add a little pom-pom magic to a store-bought cupcake!

Who could resist a gift as sweet as this? Not only is it the perfect Mother’s Day gift, but it would make a sweet gift to celebrate any occasion. Pair these pom-pom posies with a gift certificate to pick up craft supplies for the crafty mom in your life.

I also joined Vine this weekend which is a fun app for making a quick 8 second video. Here is my 8 second video of my pom-pom making. I would like to disclose that I am in my favorite polka-dotted pajama pants here for this super professional tutorial!

Ever wanted to tackle making a family cookbook with your kids? I’m so excited to show you how we made a scrapbook of our favorite foods and food traditions together. Making a cookbook with your kids is a fun activity that any family can do together and we are so excited to show you how we created ours.

If you know us, one thing that our family is big on is traditions created around the dinner table. Whether it is our pizza night on Fridays, our waffle tradition on Sundays, or the way we commemorate every little occasion in life, we somehow find a fun food tradition to surround the event. Today I want to showcase a way to truly document those food traditions by creating a family cookbook with your kids that can be a fun project to create together as well as a legacy of your family traditions to pass down to future generations.

Earth Day is upon us and I love to have reminders of the beauty of nature around me when this day comes around. Pairing my love for nature with my love of upcycling commonly found items in our home, and it is the perfect marriage of the things I love for such a special day.

Today I wanted to share with you an easy craft that you can do with your kids to commemorate Earth Day. These painted drip jar vases are a fun way to experiment with paint and pattern to create a vase that is uniquely your child.

I love to find fast & easy knitted projects and today I have the perfect beginner knitting project for you using a new yarn from Red Heart called Sashay Yarn. Red Heart Boutique Sashay Yarn is a unique yarn that creates a beautiful ruffled scarf with a simple six stitch cast-on. Red Heart sent me this yarn and some knitting supplies to show off just how easy it is to create a project with this inexpensive and fun yarn.

The first thing you will notice is that this yarn is very different than a traditional yarn. I will admit that I usually avoid novelty yarns except for trimming knitted projects so it is the type of yarn that I have probably walked by countless times at our local Walmart. Instead of a traditional single strand, this yarn is actually a woven yarn that features a touch of metallic for an extra edge to your ruffled projects. The yarn is made of 97 percent acrylic and 3 percent metallic polyester. One skein yields 30 yards of yarn, which can create a five foot ruffled scarf with just one ball.

Longtime readers may have remembered these amazing ruffled scarves I knitted for gifts one Christmas. As the last picture shows you, it was an insane amount of stitches that required an infinite amount of patience to cast on and to cast off. The last two rows on this scarf had over a thousand stitches each. The beauty of that ruffle made it all worthwhile, but for a beginning knitter, this process is both daunting and time-consuming. For an experienced knitter, it just takes a long time to yield impressive results.

Knitting with Sashay Yarn creates a fast ruffle in no time and with only six stitches cast on! As you can see from this picture, the yarn is already woven so it creates the ruffle without you needing to knit it and when knitting this scarf, you just gather this woven yarn into ruffles with simple garter stitches.

Rather than casting on with your traditional cast-on, you will simply pick up stitches off of the edge of the yarn. When knitting, you knit as you would normally, just picking up along the edge, but you skip the first loop of yarn and then slip into the second loop for the stitches. Casting off is done in the same way, with the skipping of one loop between each stitch, and then with the final loop of thread on your needle, you just weave the tail end through to finish your project. I then trimmed the edges of my scarf to make them even.

Some of my own personal recommendations when knitting this pattern (linked below) are to choose needles that are shorter in length and to use bamboo ones (these are the ones that I use) that will help to grip the threads better and keep your stitches in place.

The scarf is simply stunning and costs a mere $4.67 (at Walmart) to create and took about two nights of knitting to create. With simply six stitches and no pattern to follow, this is the perfect project to do while watching your favorite shows on television or to take with you while the kids are doing their extracurricular activities.

I imagine that this will make a perfect Mother’s Day gift this year and I can’t wait to show you what else I am up to with the next ball of yarn I have! What can I say? I am addicted to fast and easy projects these days!

Easter is just around the corner and Goodwill has you covered with 11 fun new ways to decorate your eggs this year. Before you tackle these egg dying projects, be sure to check out the store for fun ways to display your beautifully dyed eggs. Goodwill offers a plethora of choices for beautiful glasses, jars, cake stands, baskets, and bowls in the Housewares department to showcase your handmade beauties!

Easter is another fun season for family, food, and crafts that you can do together as a family. Embroidery thread eggs are an easy craft that yield impressive results that can be used as an Easter table centerpiece or can be strung with yarn to adorn a mantle or decorate a window. I want to show you how to create your own Embroidery Thread Easter Eggs for a fun decoration in your home.